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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

I find two things incredibly ironic:

1) The UK willingly submits all of its net traffic to monitoring, snooping and supervision by a Chinese firm. This is mindboggling. Why worry about NSA's ECHELON or PRISM now, when the government has just passed a law requiring every packet to be inspected by a Chinese system.

2) Let's learn from those who are best at censorship. Obviously China has significant experience in that area. UK has a lot to catch up, but they're working on it.

Think about it -- if somebody told you 10 years ago that the United Kingdom will outsource country-wide Internet traffic monitoring, policing and censoring to Chinese companies, you'd call them a nutjob.

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I find it extremely unfortunate that more of the "democratic" countries are now starting to see China's model of censorship and surveillance of its population as something to aspire to.

This is not just a one-off. It's a trend. They all seem to want what the Chinese government has (full control over its population), while still "pretending" it's a democracy and everyone's rights are unharmed.

There's an unfortunate view in the learned press that business-like governments such as Singapore and China are able to work efficiently and generally get things done and are generally to be admired (though not always publicly). Combine that with the UK Government's Big Sister approach to managing the population and the worst effects of political correctness and you can see where this is all heading - a country safely protected from itself under the watchful gaze of those that know what's best for us - Downton Abbey on a grand scale.

It's unfortunate but it's true - China has the advantage that without those pesky elections to worry about it can take a longer term view of things and be planning over a 10 year period, not a 5 year period with re-election and all the populist stuff that requires.

Obviously that's only part of the story but the discussion certainly becomes more "interesting" than it did in the 80s when democracy seemed to give better results across the board having the moral and economic high ground.

Not for a moment endorsing the Chinese approach, just saying that there is a more interesting debate than there used to be.

Too bad that actual planning seems to take a backseat to "my own swiss bank account in 10 years" planning. The same problem "islamic democracies" (or the "islamic republic") or dictatorships have. And then western (and Chinese) companies come in who promise personal kickbacks in trade for contracts. And soon the situation happens that companies who don't do this simply can't get any business at all.

China will get killed by it's own politicians much quicker than any western democracy. They're still growing, today it's easy for them because China is growing at 7% per year. It will get hard soon and things will change. Fast.

Because no Western politician ever made decisions thinking about a non-exec directorship at some point in the future or campaign contributions.

Politics is a mucky business full of self interest the world over, let's not pretend that's a problem for China alone.

Conversely when people in China (or elsewhere) campaign for more liberty and freedom, the Chinese government can point to the USA/UK/EU/etc and say "Look they block things too!". Likewise when UK/EU/USA/etc. tell China to stop blocking things, China turns around and says "But you block things!"

Let's be clear: government has not just passed a law requiring packet inspection, and there are ISPs who provide unfiltered connectivity. (Eg as discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6082595)

The government is proposing that they may bring legislation to Parliament if the industry doesn't do something to thinkofthechildren, but what shape that might take is not yet clear.

In other words: It could end up much worse.

It's "you do something 'voluntarily' now, which there'll be absolutely no democratic oversight over, or we force you". So instead of getting a nasty filtering system subject to freedom of information queries and parliamentary inquiries, we get a system where we are subject to the whims of these businesses, who will all point to the government and say "ask them", while the government will point to it being something the companies added "voluntarily".

Frankly, "voluntary regulation" like this should always be a massive warning flag.

Exactly. Let's all remember that we often call politicans sleeazy corrupt ineffective busybodies who'll appear for the opening of an envelope, and who make statements and press releases to manipulate the press & public. However when something like this comes along, suddely politicans are disciplined, determined, principled fighters of smut who can get their way....

My point is that it doesn't help to advance a case by stating things that are not true - it just undermines the argument.

> Let's be clear: government has not just passed a law requiring packet inspection Correct. That happened in the past already when ISPs were required to block access to the pirate bay.

The Pirate Bay block was not a law imposed on all ISPs.

It was a court order imposed by a judge for a specific case brought by the recording industries against the few largest ISPs individually. Part of the case was basically that the ISPs already had filtering systems in place (in that case for the IWF child abuse blocks - again, not required by law but installed "voluntarily"). So the industry essentially said that adding TPB to the existing blocklist wouldn't be too much of a burden.

(I believe that similar orders have expanded it to cover a few more sites since, but not sure whether those cover all the same ISPs again).

The Pirate Bay ban has extended to most of the big ISPs, BT, TalkTalk, Virgin, etc. British.

> Think about it -- if somebody told you 10 years ago that the United Kingdom will outsource country-wide Internet traffic monitoring, policing and censoring to Chinese companies, you'd call them a nutjob.

And today we call them Prime Minister. Fuck.

To be fair, a substantial number of people call whichever prime minister is current a nutjob (or worse), so that doesn't seem to be a big change.

I would like to point out that this article does not state that all UK traffic is being filtered by Huawei. The article mentions David Cameron praises the filtering system used by a single UK ISP, TalkTalk, and has demanded that similar measures be enforced by other UK ISPs. The article then describes the filtering system that TalkTalk uses, which is provided by Huawei.

Ofcom (an independent regulator) reports (http://media.ofcom.org.uk/facts/) that TalkTalk has a 17% market share at the end of 2012. So not all of the UK's net traffic is filtered through a service provided by Huawei.

The article says it's only TalkTalk's traffic that is monitored by Huawei, not all the traffic in the UK.

Cameron just thinks it's awesome and would be happy if it was all of the traffic. Which actually is probably even worse.

It also says "For almost a decade, Huawei has been a core part of telecoms infrastructure in the UK".

Isn't it just using Chinese hardware? EDIT - I understand the hardware may be doing more than what it says on the box.

Michael Hayden (former CIA head) says there is 'hard evidence' that Huawei has spied for the Chinese government. However he hasn't released any evidence. To be honest I don't really trust the CIA/NSA or Huawei. I think you just have to assume that if they _can_ spy on you, they _will_.

And giving another state access to black mail information is not a good idea

Is Huawei one of Lynton crosbys customers?

The only solution is: create more porn net traffic to blind all those inspection ... :)

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